Android Application Level CPU DVFS Tuning

Battery life and performance are two important aspects for smart phone devices. The Android platform runs on top of the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel allows Android users to tune or control the CPU settings via virtual governors and cpufreq in the application level. This thesis introduces an approach to tuning CPU DVFS Ondemand governor at the Android application level that allows better balance between the two aspects. This approach gathers information based on system sensors, application context, and CPU utilization to tune the Ondemand governor policy. Our approach allows users to tune their governor policies dynamically and without having to reinstall custom Android OS for their phones to achieve this balance. We compared the Ondemand and Interactive virtual governor settings to our approach for performance and power consumption. From our benchmarks, it is possible to achieve 8% to 17% power savings on idle state. For high single core CPU utilization, energy consumption improved for in a quad-core and dual-core system respectively by 7% to 13% without decrease in performance